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Interconnected, autonomously driving cars shall realize the vision of a zero-accident, low energy mobility in spite of a fast increasing traffic volume. Tightly interconnected medical devices and health care systems shall ensure the health of an aging society. And interconnected virtual power plants based on renewable energy sources shall ensure a clean energy supply in a society that consumes more energy than ever before. Such open systems of systems will play an essential role for economy and society.
Open systems of systems dynamically connect to each other in order to collectively provide a superordinate functionality, which could not be provided by a single system alone. The structure as well as the behavior of an open system of system dynamically emerge at runtime leading to very flexible solutions working under various different environmental conditions. This flexibility and adaptivity of systems of systems are a key for realizing the above mentioned scenarios.
On the other hand, however, this leads to uncertainties since the emerging structure and behavior of a system of system can hardly be anticipated at design time. This impedes the indispensable safety assessment of such systems in safety-critical application domains. Existing safety assurance approaches presume that a system is completely specified and configured prior to a safety assessment. Therefore, they cannot be applied to open systems of systems. In consequence, safety assurance of open systems of systems could easily become a bottleneck impeding or even preventing the success of this promising new generation of embedded systems.
For this reason, this thesis introduces an approach for the safety assurance of open systems of systems. To this end, we shift parts of the safety assurance lifecycle into runtime in order to dynamically assess the safety of the emerging system of system. We use so-called safety models at runtime for enabling systems to assess the safety of an emerging system of system themselves. This leads to a very flexible runtime safety assurance framework.
To this end, this thesis describes the fundamental knowledge on safety assurance and model-driven development, which are the indispensable prerequisites for defining safety models at runtime. Based on these fundamentals, we illustrate how we modularized and formalized conventional safety assurance techniques using model-based representations and analyses. Finally, we explain how we advanced these design time safety models to safety models that can be used by the systems themselves at runtime and how we use these safety models at runtime to create an efficient and flexible runtime safety assurance framework for open systems of systems.